Budget Earpieces – Xiaomi Piston 2 (First Impressions)

After a month of waiting, I finally got my Xiaomi Piston 2, and here are my first impressions.

The box itself

The Xiaomi Piston 2 came in a small cardboard box that can be easily opened by cutting the round sticker with a thin object, such as a card. After opening, the case holding the earpiece itself can be seen.
The box contains the Xiaomi Piston 2, three earbuds in three different sizes (labelled S, M, and L), and a clip for attaching the earpiece to one’s shirt. The box itself looks pretty premium, and the earpiece itself doesn’t feel cheap either:

Contents of the box

Moving on to the Xiaomi Piston 2 itself, the earpiece in question does not look cheap either. It is well packaged around the rubber, although personally I would not prefer that, as it presses against the cables and creates jagged edges on the cable coiling. But of course, since the cable is made of Kevlar, it may or may not stick. It is not the first time I’m dealing with Kevlar cabled earpieces though, my first one was a Monoprice earpiece, and it sounded and felt terrible. Xiaomi has also provided a nice frequency graph for picky people like me who pay very close attention to audio:

Credits: Xiaomi

As you can see, the frequency response graph tapers off at the 10 kHz to 20 kHz area, and is a little pushed down on the 1 kHz area. This is not a problem though, as when tested on my THL 5000, turning on Dolby Digital Plus (I’m using this ROM, in case you’re wondering why that exists), and using a 0.1 spectrum extension and a 10 dB 100Hz Natural Bass boost on ViPER4Android gave the best audio quality for me. (On the Brainwavz Delta I had to use a 0.8 spectrum extension with the same configuration).

Overall, I am generally impressed with the Xiaomi Piston 2. It has great sound isolation, while at the same time providing a decent audio quality, all under 100 SGD. A full review of the Xiaomi Piston 2 will be written some time next week for daily usage and detailed audio quality breakdown.